What's the advantage of having commissioned vs. noncommissioned officers?

Factual Questions
21

Mostly a matter of education. The working career is intended to be just 20 years long because you don’t want a military full of graybeards like myself.

Look to civilian medicine. There are certainly plenty of 30 yo nurses with 4 or 6 years of education and 6 or 4 years of practical experience who have the moxie to become MDs. But not the desire to interrupt their life and their income for the 10 or 12 years of being a full-time student / trainee they’d need to become a fully practicing post-residency MD.

A secondary matter is the fundamental difference between managing and doing. There are people who want to do and have no interest or aptitude in managing. There are also people who want to manage and have no interest or aptitude in doing. Putting either kind of person in the other role is a recipe for disaster.

Returning briefly to the MD/nurse example … There are many nurses who chafe at the over-supervision and under-autonomy of their skilled position, yet are profoundly uninterested in becoming MDs even if the process were easier. Because the nature of the work is very different.

See also further below my answers to these next quoted posts.

As said by @DrDeth, warrants are intended to be the high-skill technician roles that aren’t in the management pyramid.

As I said at the beginning of my post, the terms manager, superintendent, foreman, and worker, are generic terms from the industrial side of commerce. In more office-y environments you’ll have "team lead"s, not foremen. But they do the same work.

I don’t know that the term “Chief of staff” is all that well-defined. But to the degree it represents an assistant to the manager in formal charge of a hunk of the pyramid whose tasks are mostly about interfacing to the actual doers, not the supporters, it certainly fits.


Returning to the big picture:

The military has a couple of problems the civilians lack.

A big one is that they cannot hire into the middle of their pyramid. They hire only entry-level people and everybody moves up from that entry level. By having officers, WOs, and enlisted (which includes NCOs), they essentially break the big monolithic pyramid into 3 smaller stacked pyramids. That provides a way to hire new young people as junior officers but into the upper-middle of the complete pyramid.

The other big one is that rank = paycheck and paycheck = rank. By and large you can look at someone’s collar or sleeve and know their monthly pay to within a few dollars. Imagine if that was true where you work. Would that it were so!

The problem is that different skills command vastly different wages on the outside. Which means there is a problem paying enough for high-demand skills. There are things like extra pay for doctors, lawyers, pilots, and now some IT types. But the overarching system is tied to rank = paycheck = rank.

WOs can be thought of as a way to solve some of that, by carving out a layer for well-paid journeymen. But it’s still stuck at a wage level that corresponds to well-paid journeymen in industry, not in fancy office work like IT or research.

This thread from 2016 has lots of useful information on point:

My substantive post is #28 in that thread. Be sure to read @spifflog’s contributions as well. He was then a senior Pentagon officer involved in deciding exactly these sorts of policy issues.

Here’s another post of mine from the middle of another 2016 thread on a related topic.

And another from 2014:

And directly about education versus the layers from 2015:

22

Nothing to really add here, since @LSLGuy nailed it, other than to offer a bit of wisdom that guided me through all my time:

“The road to hell is paved with the bloody bodies of Lieutenants who did not listen to the advice of their NCOs.”

The gentlemen that pinned on my badge at graduation gently pounded it into my chest, while whispering the words, “Listen to, and trust your good NCOs.”

Tripler
T’was the best professional advice I’d ever heard, and I heeded it well.

23

Yep. A very good friend of mine actually has given me some insight into this - he became an officer in the Army at 35(!) after I’d been good friends with him for over 20 years. He was a signals officer- he explained it very similar, in that he was trained in how to manage people, and how to manage the signals stuff in broad strokes- how a network was supposed to be set up, how the radios were used, etc… but he wasn’t expected to say… know how to crimp a cat 5 cable, configure a router, or actually set up or work the radios themselves. Those were things that the enlisted people under him did.

Probably not as much as you’d think; from what I can tell, if you’re a motivated person, they’ll pay for you to do one of two things- do some kind of delayed enlistment while you get your 4 year degree, at completion of which you’ll enlist and go to OCS, or if you’re already enlisted, you can get a degree on the government’s dime, and then apply to OCS after you have it. I suspect if you’re not motivated enough to have a degree or get a degree on their nickel, they aren’t terribly interested in making you an officer.

That said, in the Army at least, if you’re not coming from a service academy or ROTC, you actually have to enlist, and then go to OCS. So you go through basic training and some other stuff just like any other enlisted person before you become an officer. My friend said that getting his commission was probably the single weirdest thing, in that his status instantly changed and people who were friendly were now standoffish, and he got saluted by people who didn’t do it the day before, and so on.

24

This is why we have Nurse Practitioners.

25

The US Navy and Marine Corps have limited duty officers who are commissioned based on skill and expertise. i.e. They’re experts in whatever role they had prior to their promotions. My sister’s an LDO and during her commissioning ceremony she was reminded on more than one occasion to, “Let the chief be the chief.” My impression is that they were reminding her both of her new role and that she should respect the chief.

She later confided in me that the first time she met her new commanding officer he made it clear to her that she was essentially starting her career anew from the bottom. i.e. She did not have the same gravitas that she had as a petty officer which is a rank she had earned after a few years of service.

26

Nitpick: “responsible for administration, standards and discipline. In combat, his prime responsibility is the supply of ammunition”. (Wikipedia). I don’t think you’d want to be giving combat orders to your Sgt Major.

27

Of course it does. During WWII there were the “90-day wonders” - college sophomores (if I recall correctly) (so 19 or 20, probably) sent through 90 days of officer school, and sent off to duty. If they were smart they took their NCOs’ advice

28

The US military still has “90-day wonders”. Though that is just the time to become an officer. Any job-specific training follows that. And most likely did in WWII as well. See

for US and other nation’s current offerings up this alley.

29

I’m probably influenced by my father’s memories of the time - which would have been the enlisted man’s cynical view of the officers he was seeing…

30

At least when my buddy did it, he had 3 basic parts of officer training- OCS, where you went through and once you finished, you got your commission. Then he had some sort of combat-style training where they basically all set up on a FOB (in the US somewhere), and took turns playing the commander and the soldiers in various Iraq/Afghanistan-centric combat scenarios. Apparently they’d do post-mortem reviews of the commander’s performance in each scenario. And finally, he had another course at his branch school about the actual Signal Corps related stuff. It took him a lot more than 90 days from getting out of basic training before they turned him loose on a unit as an officer.

31

Doctors don’t want to wipe asses or change bed pans. It’s actually a perfect analogy. Nurses come in with less education and develop more practical, hands-on experience. Usually, they are much, much better at doing a lot of procedures. The Doctors are just good at telling them what procedure to do and when.

32

Another thing to realize is that Command Sergeant Major is not a sole individual. He is part of a “command team”. That command team can be looked at as a single entity. The minute a LT thinks he/she outranks a CSM, is the minute “the command team” proves otherwise. Even CSMs actually “outrank” each other based on the command team to which they belong. A CSM who is the senior enlisted advisor to a LTC, is much different than one who is the senior enlisted advisor to a COL or GEN… or 4-Star General.

33

There was apparently a real shortage of officers just after WWII, when everybody was being sent home as fast as they could. I don’t think my dad had any training beyond OCS: as a line officer in the navy he never qualified to be a deck officer – or anything else. He could swim, he could type, he past a sidearm qualification, and he owned Navy Whites: I don’t think he every had to exercise any other technical skills.

34

There is a Bill Mauldin cartoon which shows a newly-minted lieutenant addressing his troops:
“I expect to receive the same respect you would give me if I were still a sergeant!”

In many former Warsaw Pact countries, everybody starts out as a buck private, and they only have a few enlisted ranks. They have staff officers performing many of the tasks that senior NCOs perform in Western armies. Do the veterans on this board have any opinions on how that set-up compares to ours?

35

I think there’s truth to both of these answers. Certainly the history of the officer/enlisted divide had everything to do with classism, which bled over into general capitalism at the time. The line workers at a Ford plant in Dearborn in the 30s were supervised by former line workers, but managed by people with college degrees and “good upbringings.” To my mind looking back at the post WWII military structure, that mindset is still present (although it is slowly changing). The folks turning wrenches on aircraft might be good solid men supervised by good solid NCOs, but the Air Force wants clean cut officers with college degrees and good family names to be the ones really in charge.

There’s small, vestigial signs of this classism in the modern military (Air Force, at least). Enlisted can have mustaches and smoke, but that’s discouraged among officers. Too low brow, you see.

At the same time, what LSLGuy says is also certainly true, sometimes. A civilian supply depot is probably going to have the same structure as a military one, with managers having logistics degrees and supervisors being former warehouse workers. But there are plenty of careers where the military structure doesn’t match the civilian equivalent. Cops, for example. In the military, rank and file cops are enlisted, supervised by former rank and file cops, but managed by commissioned officers. In the civilian world, every lieutenant and captain is a former beat cop who worked their way up the ranks and attained their position based not solely on having joined the right “track,” but on their aptitude for leadership.

Likewise with my own career field of comm. Some jobs, like pulling cables, might have civilian equivalents where you have line workers doing the grunt work as directed by managers with network engineering degrees, but in the civilian world it’s highly unusual for anyone to come out of college with an MIS degree and immediately be put in charge of grizzled server administrators with 20 years of experience. In the military world, that’s the norm.

My last example is the government civilian career path, which has no such divide between officer and enlisted. The GS pay plan is completely linear. Yes, there are management, supervisor, and line jobs within that structure, and it’s not unusual for a younger GS-14 to be managing GS-11s with many, many more years of experience. But it’s also very likely that the GS-14 started out as a grunt themselves and worked their way up the ranks.

I’d say for the most part, the stark division between NCOs and commissioned officers, where a line level supervisor with 10 or 15 years of experience is simply unable to move laterally into a management level position based on merit, without starting out at square one alongside fresh college grads, is unique to the military. That is to say, even in the examples posted here of civilian workforces with a divide between the college educated managers and line workers, there’s usually no barrier to a shop foreman getting a degree in night school and applying for a job as a junior- or a mid- level manager. In the military, that same shop foreman’s only option would be to start out as an entry-level manager, effectively nullifying his years of experience in terms of job placement.*

*There are special grades that allow enlisted folks who become officers to get a little bit more pay for the first few years, to compensate for the experience they bring, but it doesn’t come with any commensurate responsibility or “credit” for faster promotions.

36

It’s not necessarily a division between college educated managers and line workers - but it’s not uncommon for there to be multiple entry points in civil service jobs. For example, you mentioned police departments earlier, and while it’s true that generally speaking, every lieutenant and captain is a former beat cop , that’s often not true for higher ranks. There is almost always a point where someone can be appointed without having worked their way up in that department- and sometimes without ever having worked as a beat cop in any department. And it happens even more often in government jobs outside of emergency services.

The same thing goes for college degrees/work experience. You may see shop foremen who went to night school getting mid-level management jobs once they get their degree, but in the similar jobs I’ve had, it didn’t work that way. The foreman/supervisor who earned a degree would still start as an entry level manger and their years of experience wouldn’t affect job placement except to the extent that the experience improved their performance in the entry level management job.

37

Agree overall. As to this:

Yes. But this is also still hugely true in civilian practice. The difference in the military is more one of formal recognition of the reality, not the actual real reality.

The Harvard MBA who waltzes un-/under-qualified into a position with authority to reshape departments who promptly wreaks havoc is a cliché for a reason. As is the cliché that soon enough he (usually he) will be CEO somewhere while the “plant rats” are still working in the plant.

38

This reminds me of the 1966 Batman series (a warped view of 1960s America, of course, but probably with a grain of truth). Chief O’Hara is obviously a former beat cop - but Commissioner Gordon is a blue-blood, who mingles with the millionaire set.

39

Yes, they offered my Dad, who had been Breveted to E7 during WW2, a Lieutenant bars to go to Korea, said he be given two weeks of training.

40

I think that to a large extent @LSLGUy’s answer and mine aren’t in conflict. They’re two sides of the same coin.

The class division between management and labor exists in non-military enterprises, but the reason is largely the same. There is an upper class of people who [can afford to] spend the first 4-8 years of their adult life in school learning to do be managers or high-skill workers and, when they enter industry, do so slightly above the class of people who have to start learning on the job at an early age.

Those class divisions are not as sharp as they used to be, but they’re still strong.

The major industry that comes to mind where they are weakest is software, where it’s common to have the CEOs of even large companies be people who started out writing the actual code and built the company themselves. Part of the reason for that is that those companies are so new and quickly growing. Another part is that except for a few autodidacts, all the workers in those industries are already part of the educated class and thus part of the pool from which “management” is generally drawn.

Construction would probably have a much more permeable labor/management barrier if everyone who picked up hammer had a BS in Engineering.